The week of Thanksgiving, I sat in my regular yoga studio listening to my instructor begin the class with a statement of intentions for our 90 minutes together. Much to my surprise she shared the following: “Thanksgiving is the time when we might expect to engage in a practice with the intention of ‘gratitude.’ While I certainly support the idea and practice of gratitude, I would rather spend our time on the intention of setting appropriate boundaries. By saying ‘no’ to family members, to food, to holiday obligations, or to other things, we are often saying ‘yes’ to ourselves in the healthiest of ways.”

Amidst the morning hustle of getting ready for work and a toddler ready for preschool I hear a light bing come from my cell phone. Thinking it might be a traffic alert, dreaded with my 35-mile commute, I hesitantly picked up my phone and instead saw a calendar alert for a director’s group meeting the next day. Director’s group? Why would I be getting a calendar invite to director’s group? And then I remembered, I’m now a member of director’s group. A few days prior I was promoted in the office and now held a seat in at the table of my office’s leadership team. As soon as my decaffeinated brain processed this information my second thought was, I’m not ready for this. Clearly this is a mistake. I’m an imposter.

While I’m sure I had this sensation at earlier points in my life, I felt it most acutely when I began my doctoral program 14 years ago. That is, the feeling that I was an imposter, a fake, that I didn’t belong. I was in a top-notch Ph.D. program surrounded by sharp classmates, all of whom seemed very focused and confident about their research interests and career direction and very assured of their place within the program. I, on the other hand, was just feeling lucky to be there. In contrast to my perceived experience of my peers, I felt rather unsure about what I might research, what career direction I might take on the other side of Ph.D., and whether I belonged there at all.

Now somehow I persevered. I wrote some well received papers, passed my qualifying exams, co-authored some articles with my faculty advisor, won some research grants, and landed a spot as a research associate on a major national research project. Despite this, my doctoral experience was peppered with fear and doubt. With every success came that feeling of, “I’ve fooled them again.” Even after I’ve managed to turn my ABD into a Ph.D. and land a series of progressively higher leadership roles within student affairs, the imposter syndrome still haunts me. Sometimes I sit at meetings and think, What the heck am I doing here? Do people really expect me to know what I’m talking about? Continue reading Overcoming the Imposter Within→